Argerich shows us what Chopin is all about. She demonstrates how this composer, along with his many other features, continually twisted the dials of music’s air-conditioning system, overwhelming cool melodic solitude with surges of warmth and intermingling cold wellsprings with hot flashes. Despite all the pathos it is sometimes made to bear, the emotionalism of Chopin’s music is always humanly ennobled. This is what makes it so eloquent in Argerich’s readings, so visceral, so powerful in its impact. The linguistic force of his music is unmistakably valid beyond the boundaries of nations and continents. That is why there are so many excellent Chopin players on this earth, but only one Martha Argerich.

Argentinian pianist Martha Argerich is widely regarded as one of the greatest pianists of the second half of the twentieth century. In celebration of her 75th birthday, Sony Classical is pleased to release Martha Argerich The Complete Sony Classical Recordings, a new 5-CD original jackets collection featuring two albums available for the first time on CD remastered from the original analogue tapes. Argerich rose to international prominence when she won the seventh International Chopin Competition in Warsaw in 1965 at age 24. In that same year, she debuted in the U.S. in Lincoln Center s Great Performers Series.

The mother through the daughter's eyes - a family portrait blending intimate conversations, agreements and disagreements, and shred ties of sounds and blood. This intimate portrait of two musical giants by Martha Argerich's daughter Stéphanie has been filmed over two decades and around the world: Warsaw, where Martha Argerich won the Chopin competition first prize; Japan, which hosts a unique Argerich festival; London, where Stephen Kovacevich, Stéphanie's father, lives, works and enjoys intensively Indian food; Belgium, where Martha lives in a house filled with pianos and cats; Argentina, which she left at the age of twelve to study in Vienna, but still conceals valuable family treasures; Switzerland, where Stéphanie and her sister Lyda are currently living. Made up of documentary sequences focusing on the two characters of Martha and Stephen in their everyday lives, in rehearsal and in performance, the film will be largely given over to intimate, delicious anecdotes, and a few scenes in which the family is reunited. A film by Stéphanie Argerich.

In our era, when large record companies parade good-looking mediocrities before us as major artists, it is good to be reminded of the real thing. Martha Argerich, as this CD demonstrates, had everything: the looks, the temperament, and the technique. By her mid 20s, she already was a phenomenal artist.

Chopin's two piano concertos have long been admired more as pianistic vehicles than as integrated works for piano and orchestra. But in his revelatory new recording, Krystian Zimerman suggests otherwise: The opening orchestral tuttis have so much more light, shade, orchestral color, and detail, you wonder if they've been rewritten. Every gesture, every instrumental solo is so specifically characterized that by the time the piano makes a dramatic entrance, the pieces have become operas without words.

Since his triumph as winner of the 1970 Chopin International Piano Competition, pianist Garrick Ohlsson, has established himself worldwide as a musician of magisterial interpretive and technical prowess. Ohlsson said of this set, “This monumental recording project first came about when the American record company Arabesque approached me with an irresistible offer to record the complete works of Chopin.